Obama's spying would make Nixon shudder

I sure hope my name pops up when Edward Snowden's list of Americans the Obama administration has been spying on becomes public.

You have to understand that for years I went into a deep funk having not been influential enough as a reporter to have made President Richard Nixon's famous "enemies list" back in 1973 and 1974.

I sat back at the old Boston Herald in deep depression when I witnessed many of my friends and colleagues in the media bragging around town how they had been important enough critics of Nixon to have made the list.

Back then it was not only news that Nixon kept such a list, but it was even bigger news who was on it because, as well as reporters, it included movies stars (Paul Newman), sports heroes (New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath) establishment figures (McGeorge Bundy) and college professors (Harvard's J. Kenneth Galbraith). That was pretty good company to be in for the lucky ink-stained wretches of the Fourth Estate.

In those years it was considered a badge of honor among liberal journalists who hated Nixon -- as most of them did -- to have made the president's list. Careers were built on being named an enemy of the troubled president. Nixon resigned in 1974 following the fallout over the Watergate break-in and cover-up scandal. Reporters were considered heroes for helping bring Nixon down. Now they are considered heroes for propping Obama up.

The list was made public by White House officials during the congressional investigation into the Watergate affair that led to Nixon's dramatic resignation.

Advertisement

Editors at The Boston Globe were delirious with joy when three of its reporters, including Nixon baiter George Frazier, the pre-eminent Boston columnist at the time, made the list. That put them in the company of columnists and reporters of The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, which, back in the day, were all important anti-Nixon newspapers.

Meanwhile, executives and reporters at the cross-town rival Boston Herald (the old Herald) sulked when not one of its employees got even a mention. The Herald at the time was considered to be friendly toward the president.

All of this comes to mind after Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who is sitting on a trove of NSA (National Security Agency) documents that Snowden turned over to him, promised to make them public.

These once-secret papers will allegedly reveal the names of U.S. citizens targeted for electronic surveillance by their own government without their knowledge, and without even being suspected of committing a crime. The NSA program scoops up all the information in its campaign to allegedly fight global terrorism.

Greenwald, promoting his book "No Place to Hide," told the London Sunday Times recently that one of the big questions surrounding NSA's domestic spying program is just who are the people under surveillance.

"Are they political critics and dissidents and activists?" he asked. Or, he added, "Are they people we'd regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets, and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer."

It will be interesting to find out how many lapdog journalists, movie stars, establishment figures and professors have had, and are having, their phone calls and emails monitored and logged by NSA under a president they worship.

Nixon, who made no bones about his contempt for the media, as well as for his critics, believed that "The press is the enemy, the establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy."

That has been turned upside down by Obama. We now have a president who can rightly say: "The press is my friend, the establishment is my friend and the professors are my friends."

So imagine the shock among all of Obama's cheerleaders and sycophants in the media when they find out, as they surely will, that their phones and emails have been monitored and stored -- along with the rest of us -- by their man in the White House. O, the horror!

Somehow I don't believe that they will be as pleased as they once were when they landed on Nixon's enemies list. Their hero will have betrayed them.

The irony is that as bad as the liberals believe that Nixon was, he did not engage in the wholesale bugging and surveillance of Americans that has taken place under Obama. Nixon may have had his dark side, but compared to Obama, Nixon was a saint.

Peter Lucas' political column appears Tuesday and Friday. Email him at luke1825@aol.com.

Welcome to your discussion forum: Sign in with a Disqus account or your social networking account for your comment to be posted immediately, provided it meets the guidelines. (READ HOW.)
Comments made here are the sole responsibility of the person posting them; these comments do not reflect the opinion of The Sentinel and Enterprise. So keep it civil.